Week of May 1st, 2022: Firefly Ritual
Soundcloud Link: https://soundcloud.com/wizardofwestmarch/firefly-ritual
This week I had two things on my mind, and ended up putting them together because that’s how my brain works. I know Neil Gaiman likes to say how putting unlike things together is where creativity comes from, and this poem is a case where it proved true.
Fireflies simply came from memories of childhood in the American South and seeing them in the summer evenings and watching them weave among each other and creating their own images, likely without meaning even as a child I always tried to ascribe something to it. Because humanity believes in cause and effect. Always attaching meaning to everything. The entire reason we tell stories is to add meaning to things that don’t necessarily have it.
The second relates to my programmer life, so apologies if this is a bit dry, but I will try to make it sensible. Someone wrote up a critique of the Go Programming language. On a site I frequent where people talk about tech and startup related things, it ended up being flagged because people were upset he had bad things to say about their beloved tool. This got me thinking about how people can come to be overly attached to tools. From computers/operating systems (Mac vs Windows vs Linux) to software (look how many writers talk up scrivener to excess, myself included) and beyond.
But if you think about it, this is not completely crazy (even if it is unfortunate). Tools shape how we look at a problem. English is a language with a dearth of rhyming options for many words, which either forces more creative use of language by poets in the language, or to simply forgo rhyming all together, which has certainly happened with frequency in more recent times.
Programming languages are much like human languages. The set of techniques they give you is much like the vocabulary and grammar of a spoken language. The options allowed decide what you can and cannot say in a succinct manner. And so people will make decisions about the entire structure of an application based on the easiest way to express it, or even worse on the way they best understand to express it (not necessarily the same thing).
And this is why people become overly attached to programming languages. Because those tools have shaped the way they think. And I know I am not without flaw here, but I’ve tried to mitigate the issue on that side of my life by experimenting with a lot of different languages over the years (from BASIC to C to C++ to Python to Visual Basic to Clojure to C# to F# to Rust, with a very brief dabble on the aforementioned Go).
Much like how the tribal nature of political discourse has made things incredibly ugly, the way programmers look at tools has badly damaged the ability to talk intelligently about the future of the entire industry, and it suffers all the more for it.
Anyway, poem.
Firefly Ritual
The fireflies are weaving all around me
On that July evening air
As I’m looking for the portents
That I might find hiding there
But instead they write false constellations
That offer me no consolations
While I’m hoping for answers
For fending off my dark temptations
I step inside their writhing dance searching
For a different point of view
But instead I find the same myths
That I already knew to be untrue
The cloud of light dispersed into the night
Leaving me with only a fading feeling
That denied me any different answers
Than what the world already concealed